Your Citizen Engagement Checklist by Tommy Bowen

YOUR CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST:

18 STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS

CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Citizen engagement is nothing new. It’s been conducted in one form or another since the dawn of democracy: Citizens and their elected leaders have met in a variety of ways to exchange ideas and thoughts on policies, processes and more. Until recently, however, this engagement happened in a relatively few ways: Town hall meetings, printed fliers, telephone calls, and in-person discussions. Those citizen engagement methods are still valid today. But we all know the landscape of engagement has drastically changed. The evolution of technology has radically disrupted citizen engagement, and it’s often a struggle for agencies and government employees to keep up with all the ways they can interact with the public. Sending e-mail and participating in social media don’t necessarily cut it anymore – but what else should you be doing? To help you brainstorm, GovLoop presents our latest guide, Your Citizen Engagement Checklist: 18 Strategies for Success. This is a collection of citizen engagement ideas meant to inspire, inform, enlighten — and, we hope, delight. There are many radically creative ways to engage citizens, but here are some of the most intriguing. Interspersed throughout these bite-size bits of strategy and ideas are interviews with three pioneers in the civic engagement space. We sat down with Sarah Kaczmarek, digital communications manager at the Government Accountability Office; Steve Spiker, co-founder of OpenOakland, a nonprofit that encourages engagement around open data; and Jenn Gustetic, NASA’s head of developing community challenges and innovation.

WHY IS GOOD CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT IMPORTANT? Sponsor Interview

“IT STARTS WITH MEASUREMENT”

18 STRATEGIES YOU SHOULD CONSIDER FOR SUCCESS:

Interview

CREATE BETTER INTERNAL METRICS Interview

OPEN DATA & CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT

14 20

Sponsor Interview

“HOW CAN WE LOOK AROUND THE ENTIRE LIFECYCLE OF SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT?”

Interview

USING PRIZE CHALLENGES FOR INNOVATION

URL DIRECTORY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So read on. We hope that these 18 ideas will inspire you to add to your citizen engagement toolkit. As the world, government and technology continue to evolve, so must your strategies — after all, citizen engagement was never about one method of communication. It’s about dozens of them. We’re here to help you figure out which ones will work best for you.

TIPS FROM THE FIELD

Throughout the guide, the GovLoop audience shares real-world tips on how you can improve your citizen engagement strategies and make even more of a difference.

“Don’t assume that all of your audience has a computer... some other means should also be included.” Rebecca, Michigan INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

WHY IS GOOD CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT IMPORTANT? We let the GovLoop audience do the talking. Here are six reasons our readers think citizen engagement, performed successfully and thoughtfully, really matters.

1. IT’S THE FOUNDATION OF OUR DEMOCRACY.

4. WE NEED TO REACH ALL AUDIENCES, NOT JUST A FEW.

“First and foremost, we work for those citizens and are accountable to them. They want to know that their tax dollars aren’t being spent frivolously and deserve to understand what we’re facing. We need them to contact their legislators and help us get things fixed. So the answer is clear: Educate them so they know what’s going on and can speak intelligently about it. They probably have some great ideas that just might work!” – Rebecca, Michigan Department of Transportation

“Significant portions of our population have been left out of building the community’s future. Current leaders do not know how to best serve these communities.” – Greg, civilsay.net, Oregon

2. IT MAKES FINANCIAL SENSE. “There seems to be a direct link between knowledgeable citizens and the ability to raise fees/levy for services. The smarter citizens are about the services they want, the more willing they are to help us design something that meets their needs as well as their pocketbooks.” – Michelle, city of Creswell, Ore.

3. ENGAGED CITIZENS MAKE GOVERNMENT BETTER.

5. IT’S GOOD BUSINESS. “I liken citizen engagement to the relationship between shareholders and a company. In Nevada, government is the largest employer and has a mission much larger than its resources. Only by engaging citizens can we find solutions that make sense and are achievable given our limited resources.” – Gary, Carson City, Nev.

6. IT’S WHAT CITIZENS EXPECT. “Today, our residents expect high-tech, web-based apps. They also don’t expect to have to wait for info or services.” – Edward, Washington, D.C., Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department

“People who feel connected to their governments participate in making government better. It’s important to feel like an individual’s voice can be heard when they address bureaucracy. Citizen engagement is more than voting or volunteering. It’s up to government to embed itself in citizens’ daily lives for both feedback and as a way of monitoring service delivery.” – John, San Mateo County, Calif.

TIPS FROM THE FIELD “Never stop listening and make adjustments to your initiatives accordingly; you can’t focus on just one method to connect, you need to diversify your outreach and go to where your citizens are for effective engagement.” Francie, California

“IT STARTS WITH MEASUREMENT”

An interview with Brian Paget, Technical Director for the Public Sector at Adobe How is technology enabling citizen engagement? Technology allows government to be more agile. And today, technology choices are being made because they enable a user experience that thrives on being engaging, flexible, and adaptable. Technology has to keep up, because the ways in which people interact are changing so rapidly. Since the interfaces are rapidly changing and the systems that are interacting with constituents must be flexible, and ever evolving. The most well run agencies are finding ways to drive down the overall cost of interaction, make interactions a two-way conversation and are moving citizen interactions to channels they are more comfortable using, through a device of the citizen’s choice.

What is Adobe doing to help government develop more effective citizen engagement strategies? It starts with measurement. If you think about how you are interacting with constituents and measuring those interactions, you’ll see what people are doing. Are they coming to your website? If they are, what are they doing when they get there? Are they finding what they are looking for? What devices are they coming from? What places geographically are they coming from? Imagine for a moment: you’re a large government entity and a virus breaks out, people tend turn to the government, first because they trust and rely on governments as a source for reliable information. So to ensure that you keep this trust you need to first make sure you understand your constituents needs, what are they looking for, what ways are they consuming the information and where are they coming from. If you don’t understand these basic metrics you risk providing the wrong information in the wrong way to the wrong people, which results in a broken trust and higher cost. This gets back to making technology based on measurement and metrics so you serve your constituents the right information in the most efficient and effective way. This is something as a commercial company we at Adobe understand better than anyone and something we have become industry leading at. Today Adobe’s main focus is helping our customers, you, deliver world-class customer experiences across any channel. We do this everyday for web, in mobile applications, in digital publications, images, videos, really anything that’s digital. We’ve been doing it for years with government, helping agencies take simple paper-based forms and making them electronic, routable, and digitally signed. We are now helping government agencies by helping to deliver compelling experiences in a cost effective way. Simply put we revolutionize the way in which that experience looks to the end user, your constituents.

Do you have any advice about how somebody who’s looking to maximize their citizen engagement experience could prioritize their efforts? The first thing you have to do is, stop guessing. You know, everybody still has the instinct to sit in a room and have everybody raise their hand and say hey, what’s the most important thing we need to do and then whoever has the most votes or the loudest voice in the room is the one that wins. And that’s not the way to make decisions anymore. What you have to do now is make objective, quantitative decisions based on data. You measure everything and from those results you need to analyze it and understand what they mean. It could be, ‘We thought people were coming to our website at the IRS to find the IRS 1040 and download it’, but it happens to be that people are looking for information on tax credits. So, understanding what your constituents are looking for, what they’re doing and what they’re asking for, from a measurement perspective, and then you can allow that to guide your next steps. So measure first and then make data driven objective decisions.

What are the top three questions agencies should be asking themselves? First thing they need to identify is their business mission problem they are trying to solve. It’s more than a software or hardware problem. What’s the business problem? Is it that you want to communicate more effectively? Is it you need to catch more bad guys, or recruit more troops? What is it? That’d be the first thing to identify. Once the business problem has been identified you need to identify how you can collect your data on what is happening to get a baseline for how effective you are being today. After that, you jump to the third thing: what is the enabling technology that you need to implement to do things better? Once you’ve done that you can measure again and deliver metrics based on real results. So, understand the mission, measure it, and then figure out what pieces of IT can help you solve your problems and measure again.

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

18 STRATEGIES YOU SHOULD CONSIDER FOR SUCCESS The only title in our democracy superior to that of president is the title of citizen. Justice Louis Brandeis

TIPS FROM THE FIELD “Do something, even if it fails.” John, Texas

Tip: This is not a completely exhaustive guide – just some of the latest trends and programs we’re excited about. Know of more? E-mail your story to info@govloop.com, and we’ll make sure it’s featured in an upcoming publication. Now it’s time to get practical. We asked the GovLoop audience, made up of government employees and experts, to weigh in on efforts that have made a measurable difference in citizen engagement. These 18 real-world strategies, ideas and programs will leave you bursting with innovation and ready to brainstorm with your team about new ways you can proactively, and successfully, engage with your residents. Let’s get down to the business of engaging your citizens.

CIVIC HACKING

WHAT IT IS:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT:

Jake Levitas, Mayor’s Innovation Fellow for the city and county of San Francisco, writing at Code for America says, “Civic hacking is hands-on, citizen-driven action which produces civic innovation — it could be contributing code to an open-source civic app, designing modular street furniture or conducting a workshop with city officials to discuss how new policy could improve a neighborhood.”

Civic hacking offers opportunities for citizens and government to connect — and it also offers government access to private citizens who have the development and coding skills that it might not yet have established internally. If you put together a smart, eager civic developer with troves of government data, then wonderful apps, technologies and visualizations can be created that the developer or the government might not have been able to build alone.

Other definitions exist, but most generally the phrase refers to citizen technologists, community members and developers who come together to create applications that improve the citizen-to-government process or build tools that give citizens more access to more government information in better ways. Where it’s been successful: Civic hacking has taken off nationwide. In fact, the Second Annual National Day of Civic Hacking, an event that happened May 31 and June 1, 2014, to bring together citizens to build tools that help their neighborhoods, was a massive success. Worldwide, 123 events were held in 103 cities in 13 countries, and more than 11,000 people participated in building tools such as a mobile website from Hack for LA that enables users to report wasteful water use.

HOW YOU CAN START:

READ: “How to get started in civic hacking.” GO: To a civic hacking MeetUp

AND: Don’t worry if you’re not a techie or a coder,

or if you know nothing about computers at all. As Open Gov Hack Night, a group in Chicago, says, “We encourage non-technical folks to pair up and learn from our community’s designers and developers. Often times, the best civic projects come from teams with a diverse background. Remember, there’s more to making a great app than just coding.”

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

A ‘POP-UP’ CITY HALL

WHAT IT IS:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT:

Pretty much what it sounds like. Think a food truck for city hall services that can go out into the community and bring services to the citizens.

Vancouver’s site might say it best: “Whether it’s because of mobility issues, time constraints or location, getting to City Hall in person can sometimes be difficult. We want to help you get what you need from the City directly and at your convenience.” Additionally, with a mobile city hall, you can access segments of your population that are harder to reach, such as the elderly and low-income communities, by going to where they live and work.

Where it’s been successful: This one comes from GovLoop reader Francie Palmer, community outreach and marketing manager in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.: “Recently our Library Services Department received a grant from the California State Library for a ‘pop-up’ mobile city hall. In partnership with various city departments, this vehicle will be launched in September 2014 at the League of [California] Cities conference in Los Angeles. This colorfully branded vehicle was designed to be flexible to be used by departments (or in a group) out in the community. For example, our Building & Safety Department can be set up at a large construction site for permits, and the next day be in a local park for online registrations, recreation offerings and/or a ‘Meet the Council’ gathering, Animal Care & Adoption Center, Planning, City Manager’s Office, Community Services — the opportunities for citizen engagement are endless.” Boston and Vancouver have also played with this concept — you can read more about their projects here and here, respectively.

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

HOW YOU CAN START: READ: This Fast Company piece on Boston’s truck (that includes a video showing the truck).

GO: Follow twitter.com/cityhalltogo, Boston’s mobile city hall account, to get a sense of its day-today workings.

AND: Think outside the box, as they say. A pop-up

city hall may not be feasible for you, but many other pop-up events have become popular in cities and counties. Consider pop-up public meetings — held outside your traditional meeting space. You might even consider pop-up public meeting walking tours, chalkboard installations in depressed areas asking what citizens want or a pop-up open house by bike.

CITIZEN SCIENCE

WHAT IT IS:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT:

The Oxford Dictionary defines it as: “the collection and analysis of data relating to the natural world by members of the general public, typically as part of a collaborative project with professional scientists.”

Citizen science makes it possible for people to monitor their communities. They’re vested in the health of where they live — why shouldn’t they collect data about environmental or health issues that might be taking place? Additionally, an army of citizen scientists can gather more data, especially on a local basis, than an official organization might be able to.

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: Public Lab is a nonprofit citizen science organization that’s had great successes in enabling people nationwide to conduct scientific experiments that have had a measurable impact. For example, following the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and resulting oil spill in 2010, many photographers and news outlets were blocked from the coastline. Public Lab published instructions on how to use weather balloons, kites and digital cameras that could photograph the shoreline from above. When the data was collected and the images downloaded, the group used a photo editing tool to stitch them together, creating an official, citizen-backed document of where the oil made landfall or where cleanups were incomplete.

HOW YOU CAN START:

READ: All of the resources on PublicLab.org’s site — it’s a pioneer in the field.

GO: To a Citizen Scientist MeetUp.

AND: Embrace your inner child. Citizen science is

fun. Who doesn’t want to learn how to take items you can get at your local hardware store and turn them into an instrument that can measure local water quality?

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

CREATE A CITIZEN ACADEMY

WHAT IT IS:

A weeks-long boot camp, academy or course that teaches citizens about the ins and outs of a particular area of local government.

“I tell them the first night…that if they walk away with nothing else, we want them to know that they live in Larimer County and they used a Larimer County service today! This might seem off, but with a 2,640-square-mile county, and eight incorporated cities/towns, some people don’t actually understand these basics.”

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT: GovLoop reader Deni La Rue, community information manager in Larimer County, Colo., tells us about her experience with a citizen academy: “This year we completed our fifth Larimer County 101, a 9-week citizens’ academy. They meet once a week, Thursday evening, from 6-9 p.m., at various county locations to learn about county services and how they benefit from them.

“Attendance is by application, and we take about 30 people each spring for the 9-week series. We stratify applications for geographic balance from throughout the county. “For three years we have been surveying the class on confidence levels and every year ‘confidence in Larimer County government’ has gone up from the first class to the last. Over five years we’ve basically recruited 150 ambassadors. “People are quite positive about Larimer County after going through the class. These people have friends, neighbors and co-workers. Word of mouth is powerful. Some graduates run for offices, others run business; some are homemakers, bakers, educators, retirees and nurses. We look for a broad base of experience when choosing applicants.

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

Want your citizens to have more faith in the government process? What better place to start than educating them on what you do and how it affects them?

HOW YOU CAN START: READ: The online syllabus for a similar academy performed in Alexandria, Va.

GO: Learn from others. “We researched best practices by looking online at other counties and meeting with three other government agencies in our region who were doing similar sessions,” La Rue said. “We took what we liked and incorporated it.”

AND: Don’t get too caught up in the process. Keep

it easy. “For the very first class we tried a ‘passport’ system (a Journey Through Larimer County Services),” La Rue said. “Participants would get it stamped at the various sessions with stamps that departments had come up with. Sound complicated? It was. Keep it simple, straightforward, engaging and authentic.”

GET ON GITHUB WHAT IT IS: GitHub is often described as a code-sharing and publishing service that also serves as a social networking site for developers. But the real superpower of GitHub is openness and the opportunity to learn from one another. Code and documents can be placed on GitHub for anyone to download, share and explore — and offer changes on. “Think of GitHub as Facebook but instead of sharing pictures of your kids or what you had for lunch, you share software code,” Ben Balter, Government Evangelist for GitHub, said in a GovLoop interview. GitHub, at its most basic level, tracks who made a change to a code and when.

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: All over the place. More than 300 government agencies are using the platform for development. See a full list of government agencies at the national, state and local levels using GitHub here. The site also has more than 10,000 active government users.

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT: Balter wrote in a recent blog post: “When government works in the open, it acknowledges the idea that government is the world’s largest and longest-running open source project. Open data efforts, efforts like the City of Philadelphia’s open flu shot spec, release machine-readable data in open, immediately consumable formats, inviting feedback (and corrections) from the general public, and fundamentally exposing who made what change when, a necessary check on democracy.

“Unlike the private sector, however, where open sourcing the ‘secret sauce’ may hurt the bottom line, with government, we’re all on the same team. With the exception of say, football, Illinois and Wisconsin don’t compete with one another, nor are the types of challenges they face unique. Shared code prevents reinventing the wheel and helps taxpayer dollars go further, with efforts like the White House’s recently released Digital Services Playbook, an effort which invites everyday citizens to play a role in making government better, one commit at a time.

“However, not all government code is open source. We see that adopting these open source workflows for open collaboration within an agency (or with outside contractors) similarly breaks down bureaucratic walls, and gives like-minded teams the opportunity to work together on common challenges.” We think that sums it up pretty well.

HOW YOU CAN START:

READ: This “GitHub for Beginners” piece.

GO: To government.github.com. If you’re a govern-

ment employee, join the semi-private peer group on GitHub to learn best practices for collaborating on software, data and policy in the open.

AND: Don’t worry if you don’t consider yourself a te-

chie or a coder. Anybody can use GitHub and suggest changes to text, policy or code.

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

CREATE BETTER INTERNAL METRICS

Tell us about your role at GAO — what do you do and why is it important? As the digital communications manager, I develop and manage all digital communication projects for this 3,000-person federal agency. My work includes leading website improvement projects based on web analytics and usability testing. In addition, I manage all content and public interactions on the agency’s social media sites. I also record and oversee the production of audio podcasts, videos and live streaming video chats with the public. As GAO’s audiences — Congress, congressional staff and the American people — become increasingly active on social and digital media platforms, we are looking to those platforms to help us meet our audiences where they are. We hope that having GAO’s information available on these social and digital media platforms will make it easier for Congress and the American people to find and use the results of our work.

Why do metrics and measurement matter in citizen engagement efforts? With analytics you have the data to see what citizens really want on your website and social media chan-

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

Good citizen engagement doesn’t mean much if you’re not able to measure the outcomes. We sat down with Sarah Kaczmarek of the Government Accountability Office to talk about how you can better measure the impact of your citizen engagement efforts.

nels, and how well you are delivering. You have an opportunity to make informed decisions on improvements to your efforts to reflect the voice of the customer and get constituents what they need.

What basic metrics must you measure? When it comes to how your website is performing for citizens, you should focus on three key areas: web metrics, customer satisfaction and usability testing. GSA’s 10 common baseline performance metrics are a great place to start with basic web metrics. These include how many users come to your website, how long they look at pages, how many pages they look at and how much they use site search. In terms of customer satisfaction, you want to look for a tool that will help you understand customers’ overall experience, how easily they could complete tasks and how likely they are to return to your site or recommend it. With usability testing, there’s no better way to help interpret your data than to hear feedback directly from key user groups!

What touchstones can you measure beyond the basics: likes, retweets, etc.? How do you get beyond raw numbers and show impact? Your metrics should help you answer questions about your social and digital media efforts, like:

I also include metrics to help raise awareness of our digital and social media activities. I include metrics that show: How many people connect with us across our digital and social media channels.

Are we making a difference to citizens?

How much has this grown or declined over a given time period.

Are we reaching our intended audience?

The composition of our visitors.

Are we improving transparency, accountability and trust?

What content they interact with.

Are these efforts making communication more effective? You also want to measure your digital and social media strategy goals: Did you accomplish what you set out to do? There is no “magic metric” that will tell you whether you’ve achieved your goals. You really want to think about the combination of metrics you need for your specific goals. For example, if one of my goals is to engage users and have them participate in a live web chat, there are a lot of measures of success. I can look at how many people joined the chat, how much of the traffic came from social media sites, how many people are using the hashtag to talk about the chat, how many questions we receive during the chat and how well we can respond to the questions posed. This also gives me a way to see whether our goals were the right ones. For example, I can monitor what people said about the chat and any feedback we get to see if satisfaction with our work increased as a result of the live chat.

What elements does an excellent citizen engagement metrics report have? A metrics report should demonstrate that your digital and social media communication efforts are reaching your intended audience and communicating effectively. As a result, your report can help you gain support internally to continue and (hopefully) expand your activities. My three must-haves: The bottom line. Include three to five key takeaways from your analysis. If you could tell someone only a few main messages, what would they be? Analytics in practice. Discuss what you did or plan to do based on your analysis. Strategic outcomes. Discuss how your digital and social media communications affect your organization.

How likely they are to return. What people had to say about their experience.

Why is it important to tell stories of impact to garner internal support for initiatives? It’s always helpful to include information on citizen experience. I like to include three to five examples of what people say about our digital and social media efforts in reports. One of my favorite tweets from earlier this year was “.@usgao generates $110 dollars for government for every $1 invested. Oversight pays. #GovTransformation.” Adding quotes like this in a report really helps you move beyond just reporting numbers.

What cities, states or agencies do you think are doing an excellent job at metrics? GOV.UK does a great job at metrics and reporting. I really like their “Inside GOV.UK” blog about developing and iterating the GOV.UK website. They publish really interesting articles about how they use metrics and how they visualize their data with tools like Tableau. They also published an interesting piece on the data behind how much their sharing buttons were used.

What newer platforms beyond social media do you think government needs to experiment with for citizen engagement? Making data easier for citizens to access is another area where innovation could help improve transparency. Open, accessible data also creates possibilities for public-private partnerships. There are steps agencies can take now to make data more available, such as publishing it in an accessible format online instead of in tables in PDF documents.

TIPS FROM THE FIELD “Listen, listen, listen. Then listen more. Crowdsourcing is the great untapped opportunity to leverage limited agency resources in amazingly powerful ways. Proactively tell your story so citizens have a better understanding of your challenges and needs, and can contribute ideas to help.... DON’T silo yourself out of fear of criticism. Criticism is one of our best tools for becoming better at what we do.” Gary, Nevada INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

ROBUST MOBILE ENGAGEMENT WHAT IT IS:

HOW YOU CAN START:

Mobile citizen engagement efforts aren’t necessarily new. It’s likely you have a mobile app for your agency or a texting strategy for emergency preparedness. But what else can you do using mobile devices? Can you conduct more significant citizen engagement via smart phones or mobile platforms?

READ: The Pew Research Center’s mobile fact sheet

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: In Brooklyn, N.Y., the local government is testing a platform called HeartGov. Texts sent to a specific number are routed to a database where officials can see, sort and respond to locals’ questions.

and report. It’s got great data that will convince you and your higher-ups that investment in mobile could be worth it.

GO: Visit the mobile gov apps gallery on USA.gov for inspiration.

AND: When thinking about new mobile strategies,

start with the problem you want to address first — not the technology. Know what issues are of concern to your residents, and make sure your app is more than simply a way to report problems.

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT: Slick web-based apps for citizen engagement are great, but what about the quarter of Americans who don’t have Internet access at home? Engaging in substantial conversations via a mobile or texting platform will increase your inclusivity and reach underrepresented communities.

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

TIPS FROM THE FIELD “We have the most success when we present ideas that make us look human and not like some sort of machine or robot! When we ask our citizens questions, they answer! When we post human interest stories on Facebook we get a lot of ‘likes.’ People treat us better when they relate to us as people and not as a building or department.”

Judy, Michigan

NEW POSITIONS FOR INNOVATION WHAT IT IS:

HOW YOU CAN START:

New positions or groups within government that promote innovation, collaboration and a new way of thinking — such as chief innovation officers, innovation teams or labs within agencies. The scope of these roles and teams can vary wildly from place to place. Some are charged with economic development, but many are also tasked with reinventing citizen engagement and more transparent governance.

READ: This piece with Richard Negrin, Philadelphia’s

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: All over the place. This GovTech.com map shows some of the cities and counties in America where chief innovation officers are in place.

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT: Government is notoriously full of red tape and bureaucracy. By developing a position or internal group devoted to innovation, you can really start to address problems in new and creative ways.

deputy mayor for administration and coordination and managing director, about the city’s new Innovation Lab and how it got started.

GO: Listen to our interview with Pamela Wright, the

first chief innovation officer at the National Archives and Records Administration. Her take: “For me, at NARA, what innovation means is the intersection of understanding what the business needs are and what the public wants. Once you have that understanding, innovation is taking those new technologies that are out there to help us deliver. That also works its way back to the work that we do within the agency.”

AND: Don’t think innovation solely means technology. As Jay Nath, chief innovation officer of San Francisco, said in this article: “Innovation is often coupled with and seen as technology, and I fall into that trap myself very often because of my tech background. But I do think that innovation is really about a new way of thinking, new approaches to old problems. It could be about how do you engage with your community better? And it may not involve technology at all.”

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

THE CIVIC ‘UPSELL’

WHAT IT IS:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT:

It’s likely you’ve done a bit of online shopping on Amazon.com. On such consumer sites, you’ve probably seen a list of related items to buy before checkout. The official private-sector phrase for this is the “upsell” — deriving additional revenue from one exchange. What if we could do the same thing for civic transactions? What if when one citizen came to your city website to request a new trash can, he or she was also encouraged via a slick overlay to sign up for your emergency preparedness texting platform? Then you’re getting two transactions out of one original intent, doubling somebody’s engagement with your organization.

If somebody is engaging with you seamlessly on one platform, it’s a good assumption that he or she might be willing to engage with you on another. A nudge is all you need.

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: The United Kingdom has implemented a massively successful “upsell” program that’s resulted in more than 350,000 new organ donor sign-ups. Read this blog post for the full story, but the short version is the web team added a link asking visitors to consider signing up to be an organ donor at the end of every automotive transaction that took place on GOV.UK. Officials also did lots of testing to see if different versions of the question had different effectiveness.

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

HOW YOU CAN START: READ: This piece from civic innovator Abhi Nemani on “Turning Civic Interest Into a Call-to-Action.”

GO: Check out the archives of Nudge, the website

for the book of the same name released a few years ago. Though the site is currently inactive, it’s got great case studies and examples of the use of behavioral interventions in the public and private sectors.

AND: Keep your eyes open during your interactions

with private-sector websites. The next time you notice an “upsell” action, consider how a version of that could be implemented in your agency.

MANDATORY E-SERVICES WHAT IT IS: Moving many (if not all) of your basic citizen interaction efforts, such as Department of Motor Vehicles processes, permits, general payments and trash can requests to online portals and digital processes.

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL:

e-government services after the government invested in these digital services and made them worldclass. By making them world-class, more citizens were even happier. A virtual circle began: Requiring e-government services forced Denmark to invest more in digital training. To deal with the digital divide, individuals could get a two-year waiver by which they were allowed to complete these services in person. Denmark also allowed family members to transact for their elderly relatives.

Through its 2011-2015 eGovernment strategy, Denmark has changed several core government services so that users have to do them online. In other words, they can’t go to an office without a waiver. It started with eight key services, moved to 28, and will be at 80 by the end of 2014.

HOW YOU CAN START:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT:

GO: Visit GOV.UK and poke around. Officials there are

Just take a look at the results Denmark has had so far. Sure, people grumbled when this strategy was implemented. But Denmark was able to save hundreds of millions of dollars by going to mandatory

AND: Realize that this is more about a culture

READ: These GovLoop Guides: Crafting a Compre-

hensive Digital Strategy, Agency of the Future – Customer Service and the Customer Service Playbook. See also the U.S. Digital Services Playbook.

doing amazing things in digital online citizen services.

change than the technology — and it’s not easy. This is a strategy that will take time, so be patient.

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

OPEN DATA & CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT Making your government data open and encouraging residents to use it is a very powerful tool in your citizen engagement strategy. We sat down with Steve (Spike) Spiker of OpenOakland, a citizen group that creates digital tools to increase access to public information to help residents of Oakland, Calif., engage more effectively with local government, to talk about how you can use open data in your citizen engagement efforts.

How did OpenOakland come to be?

What has OpenOakland accomplished?

I’d seen that [local hackathons] were yielding a lot of interesting relationships and connections, but they weren’t achieving a lot of real change; they weren’t really an effective thing for improving civic technology, for helping governments to be more connected to this effort. And we realized that there wasn’t a good mechanism for doing what we were trying to do; what hackathons were doing was community building and maybe getting some prototypes and that was about it.

The first project that OpenOakland incubated from a concept started at a hackathon was one where we developed an open budget tool that gave people access to the budget information of Oakland. It transformed the civic budgeting process. We were able to encourage the city to publish the raw budget data for the first time ever, in a structured database, and then we displayed it visually. But it really transformed the whole city discussion. We have heard people in cafes talking about this tool, and we heard people at public events sort of yelling out the fact that it exists, and that it’s the best ever — they can actually see what the city is doing now with their money for the first time.

They weren’t the solutions that we hoped they were early on. And we realized that we had a group with a ton of technology talent working with some really cool companies, a lot of folks interested in social and civic problems, a lot of government technology struggles, and a really un-transparent city hall, and that we needed to create something as a way of sustaining the work around hacking on new technology, redeploying existing tools that made sense in other cities, tools that would be valuable in our city as well.

TIPS FROM THE FIELD “Share your successes and failures and do it in an open way!”

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

John, California

OpenOakland has obviously built a lot on open data and encourages its use — Oakland’s open data policy was drafted by public process — but what are you doing to encourage sustained and active use of open data by citizens? If the open datasets are just sitting there and nobody’s using them, what value is that adding? That for us is a source of a lot of frustration, and a lot of potential, obviously. So, from our perspective, it’s something that we want the city to be stepping up into, and we haven’t seen that yet. And so part of the advocacy we’re about to start on will be revisiting, re-raising this as an issue, because the city has started publishing a bunch of data, but there is a very small amount of effort going to maintain it and into engaging the community with it. And so we’re getting a little worried that the city doesn’t have the will to put the resources behind this to make it effective. We’ve been waiting for the city to develop an implementation plan. We’ve raised

the potential of a community committee that’s part city, part community staff, who would actually do the work of the implementation plan, which would get around some of the lack of internal capacity. It would allow for an interesting partnership.

In Oakland you’ve got a lot of people who are interested in technology. What tips would you give to somebody in a setting where that’s not the case who’s interested in doing something like OpenOakland? Just pick an issue you care about first and start working around that. Whether you’re in a rural area and you’re dealing with the issue of not enough fire breaks around farm properties, and then saying, ‘Well that’s a particular thing that we care about and there’s a way that technology can inform that, and we need to get more data from government to understand it, and then we can potentially build some in that shows people the reality.’

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

CLOUD SOLUTIONS

Oracle helps public sector customers realize their cloud computing goals ORACLE CLOUD SOLUTIONS • Comprehensive, with an unmatched breadth and depth of offerings for public, private, and hybrid cloud computing at every level of the technology stack • Flexible and Modern, with advanced capabilities including social and mobile technologies and built-in business insight • Secure and Reliable, with world-class security and reliability for missioncritical systems

“HOW CAN WE LOOK AROUND THE ENTIRE LIFECYCLE OF SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT?” An interview with Aaron Cornfeld, Group Vice President, Public Sector, Oracle How is Oracle helping government agencies develop more effective citizen engagement strategies? We have a program that is intended to work with government agencies on extending and enabling their digital engagement efforts. It’s called the Social Garage. For us, it’s all about generating actionable engagement with their constituents, so that the government can go out, engage, inform, and educate constituents, and those constituents can see themselves interacting with a modern government, a government that is very reactive to their needs on a one to one basis on their channel of choice, and a government that is proactive. What we want to do is make sure that, whether it’s an agency, city or county, we want to help them be perceived as modern, and being responsive to the needs of their citizens. A part of that is about figuring out how these agencies can help approach their objective strategically. So instead of tactically looking at one piece – should I tweet, should I use email or mobile, should I use this, that or the other thing – how can we look around the entire lifecycle of digital engagement? How can we reduce our time and cost for content creation? How can we manage the social processes and the permissions that people on our teams need to have in order to effectively communicate with constituents? How can we engage with citizens on a one-on-one basis, and do it with the right tone? And ultimately, how do you cut through the noise, because there’s a lot of noise in social media? Figure out what’s important, then measure and monitor the performance that you’re getting through social media channels.

Do you have any tips on how an agency could prioritize what’s important in their citizen engagement efforts? You need to figure out what the goals are, and then make sure that your strategy is aligned towards those goals. You know what can you do well, what does your message need to be, and then, how can you best do those things? For each agency they’re going to have a different goal. For some agencies, the goal is about providing the best customer service. With another agency it’s about responding to enquiries quickly or blasting out emergency response information. Based on your goal, you then need to ask yourself, what is the best means for me to go after our goal? Is it something that’s short and sweet like Twitter? Maybe it’s driving somebody to a website. Is it an interaction taking place on a mobile device? At the end of the day, it’s all about figuring out what your over-

all message is, what you’re really trying to accomplish, and then looking at the right platform for that. Furthermore, governments need to adapt their engagement strategies to the needs of each generation. Baby boomers tend to prefer written communications or the phone, whereas Millenials prefer social media and text messages. Then you have the new Generation, which is called Z, who swear by the smart phones, everything needs to be in an App.

What ways can government improve the customer experience for its citizens? I think the most important thing about enhancing customer experience is to come up with an integrative platform across all of the communication methods and allow citizen to interact with you when and how they want. We live in a world that is constantly connected – the expectation is that I can access government services when I want, how I want and wherever I am. Governments need to account for that, and design the customer experience around how a citizen interacts with government. Maybe it’s the DMV, people sometimes have to go into an agency, communicate through mobile devices, social media, or call centers, and the approach needs to be integrative. One of the key things that we look at, and that we advise our customers to do and work with them on strategies to do, is to come up with a platform and an overall strategy that is effectively multichannel to make sure that they’re giving the same service regardless of the platform that they’re using. And today, a lot of our government agencies are in silos – they have this system for this, that system for that, another system for something else. I think we all know there’s nothing more frustrating than going onto the web and putting in a request for something, or making a request for a new driver’s license, or whatever it is, and then calling into a call center and they have no idea that you did something on the web. It is also important that they implement responsive web design, streamlining the layout of their customer facing digital sites for the form factor from which people are accessing the content. A polished user experience on any device, whether PC, smart phone or tablet, is crucial to a positive citizen interaction. We think that the best thing they can do is start to focus on these multichannel interactions, and ultimately again, that’s about the strategy of trying to combine all of these different areas into a single holistic strategy that they can go after.

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

911 TEXTING

WHAT IT IS:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT:

What it sounds like: being able to text a 911 call center in an emergency instead of having to call.

The benefits of text-to-911 are myriad and obvious. For one, it would be a boon to people with hearing impairments. Additionally, there are many scenarios in which a person might need to silently contact emergency dispatchers, such as if an intruder is nearby or if the caller has been kidnapped. Teens in dangerous situations might also feel more comfortable texting for emergency services.

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: Very few places. According to this recent Governing article, only 100 emergency call centers out of more than 6,000 nationwide can receive and respond to text messages. Hamilton County, Ohio, is one of the few localities that has been able to implement it.

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

HOW YOU CAN GET STARTED: READ: The Federal Communication Commission’s “Best Practices for Implementing Text-to-911.”

GO: Educate yourself on NG911, or next-generation 911. AND: Don’t worry that your system would possibly

be flooded by thousands of 911 texts you couldn’t handle. Hamilton County handles 688,000 calls annually but as of the August 2014 Governing article, had received only four text-to-911 messages.

INTERNET OF THINGS WHAT IT IS:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT:

Today people must proactively connect to the network or Internet via devices such as smart phones, tablets and computers. They also have to proactively call 311 for a complaint or 911 for an emergency. But what if people were connected automatically to systems of services instead? Imagine if a series of connected devices and sensors could automatically prevent your car from crashing into another or sense dangerous gas levels in your home and automatically alert responders. What if a building with the proper sensors could more effectively cool and heat its interiors, saving thousands of dollars on energy output? That’s the potential impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) — a way to automatically and seamlessly connect with your citizens and help deliver services to them without any physical action.

More even than the consumer-facing sector, government is set to be completely transformed by this new, futuristic technology. But most government workers don’t know yet what IoT even means. Even if your agency isn’t close to deploying IoT technology, it’s worthwhile to start brainstorming ideas on how it could be applicable to you.

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: San Francisco provides an example of how IoT has affected a very basic public-sector citizen engagement and service delivery issue: parking. The city has connected several thousand of its parking meters via sensors so that drivers using an app can find open spaces faster. To help get to a reasonable level of parking availability, the program and its parking sensors periodically adjust meter and garage pricing up and down to match demand.

HOW YOU CAN GET STARTED:

READ: Our recent free guide, The Internet of Things: Preparing Yourself for a Connected Government.

GO: Brainstorm. Michael Chui, a partner at the

McKinsey Global Institute, told us the most important thing about IoT use is figuring out an end problem you might need to deal with. “First, go through your agency and think: If you could continuously measure something that was core to your agency’s mission, what would that be? How would that allow you to provide your services? How would it solve problems for your citizens? Then, after you’ve figured that out, seek out IoT solutions — not the other way around.”

AND: Don’t worry about cost. You may think that

sensor-based technology is expensive, but much IoT technology can be experimented with using offthe-shelf sensors you can buy at Radio Shack and a bit of ingenuity.

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

DESIGNCENTERED THINKING FOR WEB

WHAT IT IS:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT:

Government agencies too often think of their needs first when designing or releasing content on their websites. But it’s essential that you take a user-centered design approach. This is a process in which end users’ needs, wants and limitations get extensive attention at each stage of the design process.

For all the bells and whistles of social media, mobile apps, connected sensors or other new engagement technology, government websites remain one of the most important ways constituents interact with their representatives. It’s important that they can do so easily.

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: HOW YOU CAN GET STARTED: NYC.gov and Utah.gov are examples of sites that have redesigned in the past few years to meet the needs of the user, instead of the needs of the department or the public relations team. The sites are simple, clean and intuitive — and most importantly, they put citizens’ needs first, so that they can get what they need without getting tangled in the complexities of government.

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

READ: This Knight Foundation blog on how design-centered thinking can transform community outreach.

GO: Watch this TED talk video from IDEO’s David Kelley about how product design has become much less about the hardware and more about the user experience.

AND: Make a list of the websites you’re inspired to

use productively on a regular basis. Write down five things about each site that you like and that make it easy to use. Why are those things important for interaction? And how can those things be applied to your agency’s site?

GIS & LOCATIONBASED SERVICES WHAT IT IS:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT:

A geographic information system (GIS) is a computer system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage and present all types of geographical data.

Displaying information on maps is an easy and excellent way for government and citizens to communicate with each other.

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: HOW YOU CAN GET STARTED: The Census Bureau used GIS mapping of mail-in 2010 census forms to rate each community’s participation rate. Some cities, such as Charlotte, N.C., integrate 311 reports onto maps on the web via GIS so citizens can visualize them.

READ: Our guide, Identifying the Promise of GIS for Government.

GO: Download some case studies of GIS and citizen engagement from GIS service provider Esri.

AND: Consider playing around with GIS technology yourself. There are plenty of ways to learn to use it for free.

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

EFFECTIVE CROWDSOURCING

WHAT IT IS:

Crowdsourcing is a process (often conducted online) by which a distributed group of people who have a common interest collaborate on specific objectives.

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL: Crowdsourcing efforts have been successful in a lot of places and in a lot of different manners. One example: California Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, led an effort this year to have citizens work together via online crowdsourcing to write legislation regarding probate law. He used an online platform that used Wikipedia-like editing and community contribution. Anyone with an Internet connection could collaborate on the legislation.

Another example comes from NASA, which is using crowdsourcing to identify images snapped from space. Officials want to create a working directory from nighttime images taken from space of cities on Earth so the public and academics can use them. They’re asking members of the public to browse thousands of photos and label population centers. NASA said once the photos are catalogued, people can use them to discover ways to “save energy, contribute to better human health and safety and improve our understanding of atmospheric chemistry.”

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER IT: We think this excerpt from a Governing article covers it: “Some organizations face problems not only of creativity but also of complexity. When citizens combine

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

their ideas and observations, they can scour the details of a problem and build on each other’s insights with a degree of specificity most bureaucrats only dream of. In the depths of the recession, the small coastal city of Santa Cruz, Calif., faced a large budget shortfall and the scrutiny of its increasingly agitated citizenry. As pressure mounted, the city looked to these same citizens for help. The general population analyzed city financial records, volunteered new ideas, and rated and contributed to each other’s submissions through an online platform. With the help of nearly 10 percent of its citizens, Santa Cruz implemented publicly generated solutions to close a $9.2 million shortfall while raising immeasurable amounts of social capital that still benefit the city and its programs. Crowd collaboration is ideal for building and sharing knowledge, coordinating emergency response efforts and developing citizen-driven policy.”

HOW YOU CAN GET STARTED: READ: The Wisdom of Crowds, a 2004 groundbreak-

ing book that hypothesizes that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” Also, this Wired editorial by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy officials showcases some amazing crowdsourcing results.

GO: Watch former White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra talk about why the government should crowdsource for innovation.

AND: Try being a member of the crowd yourself to

see the experience. Become a Smithsonian digital volunteer. The institution is asking for members of the public to help transcribe and digitize its archives.

CREATE A PUBLIC DATA DASHBOARD WHAT IT IS:

HOW YOU CAN GET STARTED:

A visual display of a government’s performance data that tracks the key performance metrics of various agencies and programs at the city, state or federal level.

READ: This IBM Center for the Business of Govern-

WHERE IT’S BEEN SUCCESSFUL:

GO: Listen to our interview with Jason Darrah, director

Everywhere from the United Kingdom to Michigan to Reno, Nevada. More and more governments are consolidating their information and data into easy-to-understand public-facing dashboards that explain how they are performing clearly and visually. Why you should consider it: A visual, data-driven dashboard is an effective way to share data and performance metrics with your citizens — and help them understand real data from neighborhoods and how it affects services. Plus, a dashboard of service metrics that anyone can view is a wonderful way to prove to your residents that you’re willing to hold yourself accountable and be open about your processes

ment report on government use of dashboards. It’s a few years old, but the information will give you a solid understanding and background on the issue. of public communications for the city of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. He talks about how its dashboard aims to help the city be more open and transparent.

AND: Keep in mind this quote, taken from this piece

by Abhi Nemani about Charlotte’s quality-of-life dashboard: “Data is a reflection of the people — who they are and what they do. It’s a picture of our shared human experience.” – Rebecca Hefner

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

USING PRIZE CHALLENGES FOR INNOVATION

When creating a prize challenge, what are the most important things to consider?

I like to say if you’ve seen one prize, you’ve seen one prize. They’re all very different. The first big task is problem and outcome definition. You start with identifying a problem, “A”, and then spend time doing more detailed problem definition to understand the real boundaries and scope of your problem.. Next, you describe what success would look like and what outcomes you’re trying to create by using a challenge approach. It’s important to clearly identify what you need the performance or outcomes of your solution to be, “B”, to consider your problem solved. It will be tempting to try to solve the problem yourself, creating your own pathway from “A” to “B” or overconstraining the solution space by adding too many process requirements based on your own perspective on solving pathways. But resist that temptation. Your job as the challenge designer is to define A and B and get out of the way so other people participating in the challenge can shine new light on pathways

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

Jenn Gustetic is well known throughout the government innovation world for her work at NASA as its challenges and prizes program executive. She talked with GovLoop about prize challenges that NASA has deployed, why these challenges are important tools for citizen engagement, and more.

to get from A to B. Because in a challenge, if you over-specify it, if you put too many requirements on it, it starts to look too much like procurement. The second big task is identifying who you think might need to be engaged to solve that problem and figuring out their incentives. For some problems, you might want to try to incentivize coders to get involved, for others you might targets scientists or technologists. There are many different types of people you could engage and the incentives for those communities might look drastically different. People participate in things for “good, gold, guts and glory”. Understanding your target solver group and customizing incentives for what matters to those groups is a critical part of challenge design. So be very careful to not say that just because you’ve seen one prize that you can apply that same model to another problem. Every problem is unique and solving it may require structures unique to their circumstances. There is not a one-size fits all approach for challenge design.

Why are challenges and prizes an important tactic for folks in the public sector to consider adding to citizen engagement efforts? There are a lot of benefits that you get from prizes that you don’t get from other methods. Some of those include things like bringing other perspectives to bear on problems, so you get outside the usual suspects. You’re enabling people that aren’t normally in your community to participate, and often times a lot of the breakthrough ideas happen when common techniques in one sector are applied to another sector, that they just didn’t know that it was a technique that’s applicable to theirs. Another is that prizes and challenges can be remarkably cost effective. We’ve seen some prize approaches that have cost as much as just one-sixth of the estimated cost it would have been to have a traditional contractor solve that same problem. So, you can find… significant cost savings, not in all types of prizes or challenges, but in some. Another advantage is that some prizes and challenges can stimulate the development of new companies and new commercial products. This is because for some prizes and challenges, the government doesn’t retain intellectual property ownership of the solutions, leaving the innovation ripe for commercialization by teams that formed around the challenge. So it’s not like the government’s just procuring something that’s already on the market and keeping

technology as it is; it’s trying to stimulate innovation and the development of new companies and new products that we might turn around and procure down the road.

If you could give one piece of advice to people looking to improve their citizen engagement strategies, what would that be? When many people talk about engagement in government, they’re really talking about outreach. Engagement and outreach are very different. It’s important to understand your definition of engagement before you go around throwing around that term. So much of the time people think about social media or other outreach activities as engagement. However a lot of the time, depending on how those tools are used, those are activities that broadcast information and inform and not necessarily engage. And so when you think about actually creating true participation opportunities or collaboration activities, remember those are different things. Informing people is not the same thing as engaging them. So you really need to define what you mean by engagement. And it also is really important to recognize that you have to bring communities along; you can’t immediately throw them into an engagement opportunity when they don’t have the baseline knowledge to be able to participate meaningfully. A lot a times it’s about maturing a community through a process before you can really do true engagement.

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

URL DIRECTORY Hey GovLoop readers — we know that many of you print out these guides for easy reading. With that in mind, we created an URL directory of all the articles sourced in this guide so you could reference them for later access. They’re listed chronologically by how they appear in our guide. Enjoy!

p. 9: Defining Civic Hacking: http://bit.ly/definecivichacking

p. 11: Public Lab: http://publiclab.org/

p. 14: Digital Metrics for Federal Agencies: http://bit.ly/metricsforagencies

p. 9: National Day of Civic Hacking: http://hackforchange.org/

p. 11: Citizen Science MeetUP Groups: http://citizen-science.meetup.com/

p. 15: Inside GOV.UK Blog: https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/

p. 9: Hack for LA, Report Water Waste: http://bit.ly/hackforla

p. 12: The Alexandria Academy Citizen Academy Syllabus: https://www.alexandriava.gov/CityAcademy

p. 16: The Pew Research Internet Project Mobile Technology Fact Sheet: http://bit.ly/pewmobiletech

p. 13: Ben Balter interview on GitHub: http://bit.ly/govloopgithub

p. 16: Federal Mobile App Directory: http://www.usa.gov/mobileapps.shtml

p. 13: GitHub and Government: https://government.github.com/community/

p. 17: Chief Innovation Officers in State and Local Government (Interactive Map): http://bit.ly/ciomap

p. 9: “How to get started in civic hacking”: http://bit.ly/startcivichacking p. 9: Civic Hacking MeetUp Groups: http://civic-hacking.meetup.com/ p. 9: Open Hack Gov Night in Chicago: http://opengovhacknight.org/ p. 10: “Boston’s City Hall on Wheels”: http://bit.ly/bostoncityhall p. 10: Vancouver Launches Pop-up City Hall: http://bit.ly/vancouvercityhall p. 10: Video of Boston’s Pop-up Truck: http://bit.ly/bostonpoupvideo p. 10: “A Pop-Up Open House. By Bike.” http://bit.ly/poupbybike

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

p. 13: “Government opens up: 10k active government users on GitHub”: http://bit.ly/govgithub p. 13: City of Philadelphia’s open flu shot spec: http://bit.ly/phillyflushot p. 13: U.S. Digital Services Playbook: https://playbook.cio.gov/ p. 13: GitHub for Beginners: http://bit.ly/begingithub p. 13: Government community on GitHub: http://bit.ly/govongithub

p. 17: “A Q&A with Deputy Mayor Richard Negrin on the launch of Philly’s new Innovation Lab”: http://bit.ly/phillyinnovlab p. 17: An interview with Pamela Wright: http://bit.ly/pamwright p. 17: “The Dawn of the Municipal Chief Innovation Officer”: http://bit.ly/dawnofcio p. 18: “One link on GOV.UK – 350,000 more organ donors”: http://bit.ly/ukdonors

p. 18: “Turning Civic Interest Into a Call-to-Action”: http://bit.ly/civiccalltoaction p. 18: The Nudge blog: http://nudges.org/ p. 19: GovLoop Guide: Crafting a Comprehensive Digital Government Strategy: http://bit.ly/diggovstrategy p. 19: The GovLoop Customer Service Playbook for Government: Your Winning Game Plan: http://bit.ly/custserviceplaybook p. 20: Open Budget Oakland: 2012-13 Adopted Revenues & Spending: http://bit.ly/dataoaklandbudget p. 24: “Texting 911: The Tech Is There but Cities Aren’t Ready”: http://bit.ly/texting911gov p. 24: Best Practices for Implementing Textto-911: http://bit.ly/911bestpractices p. 24: “How to Design 911 for the 21st Century”: http://bit.ly/design911 p. 25: GovLoop Guide on the Internet of Things:

http://direct.govloop.com/internetofthingsguide

http://bit.ly/csforgov

p. 26: “How human-centered design thinking can transform community media”: http://bit.ly/hcdformedia

p. 28: “Aneesh Chopra On Why The Government Should Crowdsource For Innovation”: http://bit.ly/csforinnov

p. 26: TED Talk: Human-centered design: http://bit.ly/hcdvideo

p. 28: The Smithsonian Wants You! (To Help Transcribe Its Collections): http://bit.ly/smithtranscribe

p. 27: GovLoop Guide, Identifying the Promise of GIS for Government: http://bit.ly/gisforgov

p. 29: Open Michigan Dashboard: http://bit.ly/michdashboard

p. 27: GIS on the Rise in Citizen Engagement: http://bit.ly/gisforengagement

p. 29: City of Reno data dashboard: http://dashboard.reno.gov/

p. 27: Learn GIS for Free: http://www.gislounge.com/learn-gis-for-free/

p. 29: “Looking Inside the Maple Leaf – How Canada Does Transparency”: http://bit.ly/canadatransp

p. 28: Crowdsourcing Dark Skies: http://crowdcrafting.org/app/darkskies/ p. 28: “Five Ways Crowdsourcing Can Transform the Public Sphere”: http://bit.ly/crowdsourcing5ways p. 28: “Wisdom of Crowds”: http://bit.ly/bookwisdomofcrowds

p. 29: Edmonton, Alberta dasbhoard: https://dashboard.edmonton.ca/ p. 29: “Making Data Actionable: Charlotte’s Quality of Life Dashboard”: http://bit.ly/albertadash

p. 28: “By the People, for the People: Crowdsourcing to Improve Government”:

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

ACKNOWL

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT CHECKLIST

LEDGMENTS ABOUT GOVLOOP:

AUTHOR:

GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 140,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government.

Catherine Andrews: Director of Content, GovLoop

DESIGNERS: Jeff Ribeira: Senior interactive designer, GovLoop Tommy Bowen, Junior designer, GovLoop Jake Brennan: Design fellow, GovLoop

For more information about this report, please reach out to Catherine Andrews, Director of Content, GovLoop, at catherine@govloop.com. GovLoop 1101 15th St NW, Suite 900 Washington, DC 20005 Phone: (202) 407-7421 Fax: (202) 407-7501

www.govloop.com Twitter: @GovLoop

INNOVATIONS THAT MATTER

GovLoop 1101 15th St NW, Suite 900 Washington, DC 20005 Phone: (202) 407-7421 | Fax: (202) 407-7501 www.govloop.com